


In God's Image

by beenicetobees



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bad Parent John Winchester, F/F, Female Sam Winchester, Lesbian Sam Winchester, POV Second Person, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:48:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28679151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beenicetobees/pseuds/beenicetobees
Summary: You are Mary, and you are her killer, you are the thing that pinned her to the ceiling and you are the only thing that’s left of her. You are many things, but you are not his daughter. He has no daughter.
Relationships: Sam Winchester/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	In God's Image

“You look so much like your mother,” he says, but you don’t. Your older brother looks more like her than you ever will, but you don’t know that. You don’t remember her face, not her strong jaw or soft eyes, not even the blonde locks your father mumbles about when he’s very drunk. All you remember is worn edges of a photograph and the smell of smoke. Flames licking the corners of a ceiling.

Maybe you look more like her that even your father knows. 

You look like him more than anyone else, dark hair and rage behind your irises. The rage that makes him look past you, searching for the woman he lost in your pointed nose and skinny limbs, your bitten nails and your brother’s clothes. 

But you’re just scraped knees and crooked teeth, just ruddy skin and tangled hair. You don’t look like your mother. Still you become her. 

You find a ring in the bottom of your father’s bag. It’s small, dainty, and silver. It’s too big for your ten-year-old hands but it’s pretty, so you wear it on your thumb. Your father’s face screws up when he sees you, and you think he is about to yell, but instead he cups your face with his hand and tells you that you look beautiful, and you feel like you could drown in it. 

You cook and you clean and you stitch up your brother, steady hands that are eighteen years too young, and it is not enough, but still you try. For sometimes you’ll do something just right and your father will smile, and that is what you are for. When your family is reckless you pick up the pieces, and you spend so much time alone that you have plenty of time to glue them back together. 

You are twelve and your father comes home smelling like whiskey. Your homework is finished with Dean's help, and now he’s asleep on the bed, his own work incomplete. You try to write his paper for him as quietly as possible, so he cannot protest. The door slams open and suddenly you are alert, reaching for the gun leaning against the table, but it’s only your father, towering and loud. 

You don’t want him to wake your brother. You know it’s been a while since he’s slept through the night, your nightmares have been coming more often now, and he is always there to rock you back to sleep. You guide your father to the bed, lying him on his side like you always do. You get him a glass of water and take his boots off, quiet and gentle like you know he wants.

“Mary?” He says to you, unfocused eyes full of drunken confusion. You say nothing. He falls asleep. That night in the cold January air you salt and burn the ring on the sidewalk outside your motel room, because you know now that you must be haunted. 

The next morning your brother braids your hair. It is uneven, and messy, but it doesn’t hang in waves around your shoulders anymore, and that is all you need. You scream at your father to take you with him, you know how to shoot a gun and you can run faster than either of them. He tells you no, and that's final, and he looks at you with hate in his eyes. 

When you hiss at him with biting words or beg to stay in one place or run away, always run away, you are taking her image and twisting it, tearing it, destroying it. You are a murderer. 

You are Mary, and you are her killer, you are the thing that pinned her to the ceiling and you are the only thing that’s left of her. You are many things, but you are not his daughter. He has no daughter. You are a china teacup that must be kept in a chest, but there is arsenic on your rim and a chip in your handle, and your father hates you. 

Every night you pray. You’re unclean, the Virgin Mary crumbled on the floor of an abandoned pulpit, and the demons and the soothsayers all have something to say about you. And your father ignored it with his thumb on your cheekbone, but you are just too monstrous to pretend anymore. So you pray for redemption in the eyes of God, for you know it’s too late for you on earth.

You are fifteen and almost six feet tall and you meet a girl in a small town. Her daddy is a pastor who hits her on every day but Sunday, and she shows up at your door at midnight, cheeks wet with tears. She asks if you want to go somewhere and you want to run away with her, somewhere far away from the original sin, but you take her to the corner store instead, and buy her a soda with the last of the money your brother left, and you look up at the stars. She kisses you under the cover of night and lays her head upon your shoulder. And even as you're gone the next morning, the ghost of her fingertips tracing your knuckles will stay with you for the next hundred miles.

You are eighteen and taller than your father. Your brother thinks it’s funny, tries to ruffle your hair despite barely being able to reach it. Your father thinks it’s disgusting. Girls shouldn’t be so tall. You hold your shoulders high. You tell him that you’re going to college and he hits you. Tells you that he can’t believe you could ever be so ungrateful. They’re doing this for you. No, you tell him. They’re doing this for Mary. And you are not Mary. 

Your brother cries. You walk out that door and you’re never coming back.

You are Sam and you are at school and you are not normal. You are big and poor and you have knife collection. People whisper behind your back, and you hunch your shoulders, trying to be as invisible as possible. You think you should cut your hair. How else to become a new person than by taking scissors to your braids in a dorm room bathroom. How else to distance yourself from the image of your mother.

But you stand over the sink with the blade in your hand, and you take one last look at yourself, and you stop. You dig through your bag and pull out your faded photograph of Mary, and you don't recognize her. 

You don’t look like your mother. You never have. You put down the scissors and unbraid your hair, working your fingers through the dark waves. It’s pretty. Your hair is pretty. And here, far away from your father and his nostalgic smile, you can be pretty all on your own. 


End file.
